True Crime

The basis for the Apple TV+ show Black Bird.

In with the Devil presents the true story of a young man destined for greatness on the football field--until a few wrong turns led him to a ten-year prison sentence. He was offered an impossible mission: Coax a confession out of a fellow inmate, a serial killer, and walk free.

Jimmy Keene grew up outside of Chicago. Although he was the son of a policeman and rubbed shoulders with the city's elite, he ended up on the wrong side of the law and was sentenced to ten years with no chance of parole.

Just a few months into his sentence, Keene was approached by the prosecutor who put him behind bars. He had convicted a man named Larry Hall for abducting and killing a fifteen-year-old. Although Hall was suspected of killing nineteen other young women, there was a chance he could still be released on appeal. If Keene could get him to confess to two murders, there would be no doubt about Hall's guilt. In return, Keene would get an unconditional release from prison. But he could also get killed.

A story that gained national notoriety, this is Keene's powerful tale of peril, violence, and redemption.

In June 1990, Ronald Baker, a straight-A UCLA student, was found repeatedly stabbed to death in a tunnel near Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his followers once lived. Shortly thereafter, Detective Rick Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, were assigned the case. Yet the facts made no sense. Who would have a motive to kill Ron Baker in such a grisly manner? Was the proximity to the Manson ranch related to the murder? And what about the pentagram pendant Ron wore around his neck?

Jackson and Garcia soon focused their investigation on Baker's two male roommates, one Black, and one white. What emerges is at once a story of confounding betrayal and cold-hearted intentions, as well as a larger portrait of an embattled Los Angeles, a city in the grip of the Satanic Panic and grappling with questions of racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of Rodney King.

In straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, Rick Jackson, the now-retired police detective who helped inspire Michael Connelly's beloved Harry Bosch, along with co-writer, Matthew McGough, take us through the events as he and his partner experienced them, piecing together the truth with each emerging clue. Black Tunnel White Magic is the true story of a murder in cold blood, deception and betrayal, and a city at the brink, set forth by the only man who could tell it.

The highly anticipated inside look at the collapse of the Murdaugh dynasty by the celebrated investigative journalist and creator of the #1 hit Murdaugh Murders Podcast, Mandy Matney.

Years before the name Alex Murdaugh was splashed across every major media outlet in America, local South Carolina journalist Mandy Matney had an instinct that something wasn't right in the Lowcountry. The powerful Murdaugh dynasty had dominated rural South Carolina for generations. No one dared to cross them.

In this compelling true crime investigation, Mandy and her reporting partner Liz Farrell looked closer at a fatal boat crash involving the storied family's teenage son Paul, and they began to uncover a web of mysteries surrounding the deaths of the Murdaughs' long-time housekeeper and a young man found slain years earlier on a backcountry road. Just as their investigations were unfolding, the brutal double murder of Maggie and Paul Murdaugh rocketed Alex Murdaugh onto the international stage.

From the newsroom to the courtroom, to the kitchen-table studio where Mandy recorded her #1 Murdaugh Murders Podcast, Blood on Their Hands is a propulsive true crime memoir, an empathetic work of investigative journalism, and an excoriation of the "good old boy" systems that enabled a network of criminals.

This firsthand narrative from the journalist who was there from the start takes you inside the investigation:

Joseph Weldon Brown confessed to more than a dozen murders across seven states. He was convicted and sentenced for killing a woman whose body he dismembered and scattered across three Indiana counties. In prison, he hogtied and strangled his cellmate, then asked the judge to lock him up for life because if he was released, he would continue killing.

Police detective Rick Reed was on the scene when Brown led authorities to the scattered remains of Ginger Gasaway in 2000. After Brown's arrest, he confessed to a shocking number of other heinous crimes--the torture and murders of drifters and sex workers, the cold case of a naked woman's body found in a roadside ditch, even the murder of his own mother. Detective Reed was the one man Brown opened up to--and the only one to cut through the deceptions and lies and learn the terrible truth . . .

In this newly updated edition, now-retired detective Reed reveals his personal theories and insights into one of the darkest minds he has ever encountered--and one of the most terrifying crime stories ever told . . .

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King comes a chilling exploration of one of America's most haunting wrongful conviction cases. Based on the hit podcast, Bone Valley dives into the dark heart of rural Florida, where a young man's life was upended by a tragic miscarriage of justice.

"Captivating, enraging, and all too true." --Bob Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road

"Bone Valley is a work of rare moral clarity and deep compassion." ―Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking

In 1987, Leo Schofield was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Michelle. Always insistent on his innocence, he was poorly served by his legal defense: the investigation was sloppy, the case flimsy, and numerous pieces of evidence were ignored. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Over thirty years later, Gilbert King is tipped off to Leo's case and is astonished by what he found: layers of corruption, flawed evidence, and deep-seated errors. He can't shake the story and starts to get to know Leo and his family. Leo shows an incomprehensible amount of grace and love about his situation, which spurs Gilbert even more to tell his story.

Bone Valley is at once a revelatory investigation into a murder, a chilling portrait of the criminal justice system, and a uniquely powerful story of grace and redemption. Gilbert King has written a new classic of narrative nonfiction.

A scientific true-crime caper stretching across the globe, The Butterfly Thief pieces together the bizarre story of one of the largest, most systematic, and baffling museum heists in the records of natural history.

In January 1947, a chance discovery rocks the world of natural science--over 3,000 rare and precious butterfly specimens have vanished from the most prestigious natural history museums in Australia. Alarmingly, the missing insects include many priceless "holotypes" the first specimen of a given species to be identified, against which all others are compared.

New Scotland Yard and a team of entomologists are tasked to catch the culprit, and the person they suspect turns out to be a fascinating, larger-than-life figure--British ex-soldier, former champion skier, painter, semi-professional yodeller, and amateur lepidopterologist Colin Wyatt.

But who was this man, and how did he pull off such an ambitious string of burglaries? What did he serve to gain from amassing a vast illicit collection of specimens? What was the root of his obsession, and was he really a criminal, marked for life by his thefts, or a gifted and imaginative collector?

A delightful puzzlebox of a mystery drawing from unpublished dossiers, case files, and on-the-ground reporting, The Butterfly Thief unfolds this captivating tale of stolen specimens in rich, spellbinding detail.

This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrific tragedy. In Sarah's exploration of Carolyn's life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing Carolyn's and Render's friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, reading obscure writings and internet posts, and attending Carolyn's memorials and Render's trial.

What emerged from Sarah's relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to their darkest ends is a book that is at once a striking homage to Carolyn's life, a chilling excavation of a brutal crime, and a captivating whydunit with a shocking conclusion.

Don't miss Dean Jobb's A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, coming June 25, 2024!

"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals," Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. "He has nerve and he has knowledge." In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered as many as ten people in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent. Poison was his weapon of choice. Largely forgotten today, this villain was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper.

Structured around the doctor's London murder trial in 1892, when he was finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well as the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Dr. Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help.

Dean Jobb transports readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard traces Dr. Cream's life through Canada and Chicago and finally to London, where new investigative tools called forensics were just coming into use, even as most police departments still scoffed at using science to solve crimes. But then, most investigators could hardly imagine that serial killers existed--the term was unknown. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, Dr. Cream's crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer: one who operated without motive or remorse, who "murdered simply for the sake of murder." For fans of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, all things Sherlock Holmes, or the podcast My Favorite Murder, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is an unforgettable true crime story from a master of the genre.

"Jobb's excellent storytelling makes the book a pleasure to read." --The New York Times Book Review